


jump with a blind trust

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: o blessed gabriel, intercede for us [3]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alcohol, F/M, Garrus' terrible terrible crush on Shepard, Gen, Introspection, Light Angst, Mass Effect 2, Missing Scene, Post-Horizon (Mass Effect), another adventure in plotless emotional conversations, in safer and healthier amounts this time, remember kids it's the alcohol content not the alcohol volume, the author's questionable marriage of Real Medicine and Mass Effect Nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 02:55:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17541317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: He lets her sit for another moment before he murmurs, “Alenko got to you.”“Yeah,” Shepard admits quietly.  Her hands come up, still laced together, so that she can press the sharp joint of her thumb against her mouth.  “He wasn’t exactly wrong,” she says, half a mumble, muffled against her own skin, and Garrus tries not to bristle too hard.Shepard and Garrus have a talk, the night after Horizon.





	jump with a blind trust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cthulhu_with_a_fez](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhu_with_a_fez/gifts).



> Hi there, my name's Starlight and I have no impulse control and I just really needed to get some stuff off my chest about Horizon in ME2. This is also a belated gift to [Kells](https://cthulhu-with-a-fez.tumblr.com/) because I missed her birthday by like two days and she's put up with...a lot of screeching about this.
> 
> Title is from Midnight Hands by Rise Against, which, incidentally, is the _most_ Garrus About Shepard.
> 
> Also, listen, I did actually give it some thought before I hooked my soldier-build Shep up with a biotic power at the start of this game, and the thought I gave it was "they HAVE neural implants that would be a perfect scaffold to repair brain damage, there is NO REASON not to use them on their new pet cyborg."

The sound of the battery doors opening isn’t really a surprise, or wouldn’t be at any other time.  But as Normandy’s sleep cycles go, it’s the middle of the night and Horizon was, to put it kindly, an absolutely _miserable_ time.  The only reason Garrus is still up is because he’s too restless to sleep, but he’s not really doing anything.  Running calibrations on the Normandy’s guns is barely more than automatic, he could probably do it with his eyes closed.  But it’s better than field stripping his rifle for the third time since they got back on board.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t shock him when he hears a knock on the inner bulkhead and a familiar low voice asking, “Mind some company?”

He turns to see Shepard standing there, dressed in her plain black and whites, her red hair still damp from a shower to scrub the last of the Horizon grit from her skin.  She looks—

She looks exhausted, honestly.  She’s looked exhausted since she stormed his hideout on Omega, since the first time he glimpsed her through his scope on that bridge, but it had been getting better, slowly.  Shepard was someone who craved having trusted people near her, and putting her new team through the wringer to prove that, at very least, they wouldn’t shoot her in the back had eased a bit of the exhaustion.  In his more honest moments—and he’s been awake for going on thirty standard hours and fighting for nearly eight of them, anyone would be too tired to lie to themselves at this point—Garrus likes to think that he’s helped, too.  Of Shepard’s new crew, he’s the one she’s known the longest, the one who knew her when she was just a marine, the one who stood beside her and watched her accept the Spectre title, the one who watched her talk Saren down and kill him and drag herself out of the debris on the Citadel.

Shepard trusts him.  Implicitly.  Part of Garrus has known it was true ever since they talked about thresher maws, ever since she let him see her drunk and furious over the massacre of her unit.  But it’s undeniable, now.  Even the crew knows it.  Not all of them are happy about it—he thinks Miranda is downright hurt by Shepard’s ongoing mistrust—but no one questions it.

Garrus would rather be blown up again than lose that trust, and he’d _definitely_ rather be blown up than take that security away from Shepard when she looks so tired.

“Not at all,” he says.  “Not really anywhere to sit, but make yourself at home.”

She grins a little at him, and in the reddish light of the battery, the circles under her eyes are almost hidden.  It smooths out the scarring on her face, where it’s still healing, and eases the pallor of her skin, and turns the white panels of her shirt bloody enough to make his heartrate pick up anxiously for a moment.

“Is there anything here I shouldn’t touch?” she asks, gesturing to the righthand ledge.  When he shakes his head, Shepard sets something down on it and boosts herself up onto the bulkhead as smoothly as a dancer, her fragile human body twisting neatly so that she lands with one leg tucked up underneath her, facing him.

They’re almost on eye level, like this, Shepard’s feel dangling well off the ground.  Those brilliant green eyes blink back at him for a moment, and Garrus turns back to his calibrations with far more attention than they really require.

“Where did you get that?” Garrus asks, gesturing sidelong at the bottle in her hand.  He can’t tell if it’s pink because of the light or just because that’s what it looks like, and Shepard shrugs unhelpfully.

“I got it out of the portside observation deck, apparently that’s where they keep alcohol on this thing.  It’s not labeled, but I’m pretty sure it won’t make me explode or stop breathing when I drink it,” she says. 

“ _Pretty_ sure,” Garrus repeats, looking up and feeling his crest rise a bit in mild alarm.  The smirk on her face confirms that she’s trying to get under his skin, and she toasts him with the full bottle before she takes a sip.

“Hm,” she says thoughtfully, studying the bottle with a neutral expression.  “Don’t know that I’d drink this by choice.”

“You drink paint thinner by choice,” Garrus scoffs.

“Fair point.  I’ll bet that Miranda has some gin, she probably knows what I drink.”  The thought seems to bother Shepard, but before Garrus can say anything, she’s rolling her head to look at him and asking, “How’d you enjoy our pleasure trip to Horizon, Vakarian?  All you hoped for when you signed back up with me?”

Garrus hums, and subvocals don’t really come through for humans—even within the range their hearing can pick up, they don’t know what the shifting tones mean—but Shepard snorts like she gets the wordless sarcasm anyway.

“Your definition of a pleasure trip is…”  Garrus trails off and gestures idly, trying to think of a word.

“Questionable?”

“ _Deranged_ ,” he corrects.  “But at least I’m confident that Cerberus brought back the genuine article, just in case watching you take on three entire mercenary guilds alone didn’t sell me on it.”

Shepard laughs a little at that, and Garrus smothers the urge to preen under the sound of it.  She’s always had that effect on him—winning a laugh isn’t as rare as some people might think, Shepard’s hardly humorless, but being able to lighten a moment and get a chuckle out of her feels like a victory nonetheless.

Garrus hesitates for a moment, dismissing an alert on the calibrations and keying in the next phase to buy himself time to think of a way to phrase his next thought.  Shepard drinks in silence, watching him work, until he finally says, “The genuine article has some new tricks, though,”

“Yeah,” Shepard says quietly.  “Some new tricks.”

“I didn’t know you were a biotic.”

“I’m not.  Strictly speaking, I mean.”  Shepard points to her temple with the hand holding the bottle, and her mouth twists in a rictus grin, the kind that shows off more teeth than most humans do in polite company.  They’re not the only big predator that made it to the galactic stage, but most species only show their teeth as a threat, not in humor, so humans have tried to adapt.  Shepard doesn’t work as hard at it, with Garrus, and it’s a weird thing to be pleased about, so he doesn’t mention it.

“See,” Shepard starts, tapping her extended finger against her temple, above one of the network of scars that wanders back into her hair.  “I asked Miranda about it, after—after I found out.  She said that most of my neural structure survived all right, but my right parietal lobe was…damaged in transit, I guess.  After I—yeah.  Probably in the wreckage.”

Garrus nods, slowly, and tries not to let on the wave of— _sickness_ that washes through him at the words.  It’s more than anger, more than grief.  It’s a physical reality, the memory of how _empty_ the galaxy was without her, of Joker’s voice on the message he sent to Garrus, tight and pained and breathless.

He can’t imagine what it’s like for her, knowing that she lost two years of her life in one fell swoop, one moment of bad luck.  Those two years are like a nightmare for him, and nothing but a blink for her.  What are they supposed to do with that?

“So,” Shepard says, rallying back on topic and focusing on his face after a moment.  “I don’t know how much you know about human brains.”

“I know that most creatures die when you shoot them in the brain,” Garrus says dryly.  “That always seemed like the relevant detail.”

Her grin softens a little at that, the wild look in her eyes fading slightly.  “Yeah, I had to look some stuff up too, after Miranda caught me up.  The parietal lobe controls movement, mostly.  Walking, talking.  Sometimes breathing.  With it severely damaged, they could have brought me back, but I would never have been the same physically, even if they salvaged everything else.”

Garrus isn’t a neurologist, but he can fill in the gaps.  “So they solved it with tech.”

Shepard’s not pointing at her head anymore, just rubbing her empty hand through her hair, as if she’s pressing her fingers against her skull and looking for proof of Cerberus’ tampering.  “Yeah,” she says softly.  “They solved a lot with tech.  I light up scans like a whole goddamn star map.  But the brain damage—they used a biotic implant like a jump in a circuit, to provide a scaffold for my brain to build new pathways.  Learning any other skills besides the one would probably put the integrity of that lobe at risk, at least for a good while here, but.”

“How’d you find out you could use it?”

Red strands of hair, half-dried, flutter in the air as Shepard shakes her head, letting her empty hand drop and taking another healthy drink of her mystery alcohol.  “I think I told you I ended up fighting my way out of the Cerberus facility they were holding me in.  All I could find was a fucking pistol and three or four thermal clips—I missed that advancement, by the way, freaked me right the hell out when my gun gave up on me.  I ran out of ammo before I ran out of mechs, and I just--”  Shepard makes a sharp gesture, clawing her hand into a fist and wrenching it toward her, and Garrus recognizes the way she moves on the battlefield.  There’s no biotic glow, though, and she opens her hand to look at the empty palm like it belongs to a stranger.  “Between you and me, Garrus?  I panicked.  If my life hadn’t been on the line, I might never have used it again.”

“I’m glad you did,” Garrus says, and it’s not until Shepard’s looking at him, surprised at the vehemence of his words, that he realizes how true they are.  “Whatever I may or may not think about Cerberus, you’re not dead,” he says.  “I say, use whatever you have—and whatever they might have accidentally given you—to stay that way.”

Shepard blinks at him for a moment, her green eyes washed of color by the red light and a flush starting to show on her cheeks from the alcohol.  Garrus blinks right back, holding her gaze, and remembers the feeling of seeing those eyes in his scope, back on Omega.  Even more than that, he remembers the raw honesty of her joy, when he took off his helmet to greet her, the light in her tired eyes and the desperate relief in her smile.

The rush of gratitude to have her standing there had been even more tangible than the grief.

The console dings politely to announce that the latest calibration cycle has ended, and when Garrus looks down at it, he’s taken off-guard by how fast his pulse hums through the exposed skin of his wrists and throat.  He feels almost as wired on adrenaline as he did during the fight. 

There’s a moment of quiet before Shepard clears her throat and says, “Well, I can’t say I’m in a rush to lose it—Miranda says it’s called Reave.  It sort of saved our ass today against those blue things, so.”

They’re called _scions_ , according to the information EDI patched through to his visor, but Garrus knows not to bother mentioning it.  Shepard plays dumb a lot, sometimes for information, sometimes for the advantage of surprise when she whips out one of the keenest tactical minds operating in the galaxy today, sometimes just because it’s easier to brush things off when she doesn’t admit to knowing what she’s talking about.  That doesn’t mean she’s not _perfectly_ aware of what they fought today.  

“Hated those things,” Garrus says as he taps in another command.  The main guns have been drawing more power than they should be, by a small margin.  Engineering mentioned it to him.  If he can figure out why, it’ll be easier to rig up something to improve them.

“Yeah, I’m going to have to develop a phobia of insects next time someone wants me to deal with the Collectors,” Shepard says, and there’s a trace of black humor back in her voice, but she still doesn’t sound _happy_. 

When Garrus glances up at her, she’s got her elbow propped on her knee, holding her pilfered alcohol up against the light and turning it to observe the way the red glow glints on the glass.  She’s frowning, a deep crease between her eyebrows and her lips pressed into a thin line, and humans really do wear their thoughts plastered all over their faces when they’re not playing soldier, don’t they.

He’s not sure if Shepard’s ability to keep up a mask took a hit after being brought back to life, or if she just lets him see more now.  Either way, when a full three minutes have passed with the same distant, grim expression on her face, Garrus makes a low rumbling sound in his throat to break the silence.

“Are you all right, Shepard?  You seem—distracted.  And not by the fight today.”

“Hm,” she says.  It’s barely a word, almost the same noise he just made to get her attention, but she lowers the half-empty bottle to the ledge beside her and clasps both hands in front of her, instead.  Hunched forward to prop her elbows up on her knees, she studies a point on the floor close to Garrus’ feet, just over the top of her hands.

He lets her sit for another moment before he murmurs, “Alenko got to you.”

“Yeah,” Shepard admits quietly.  Her hands come up, still laced together, so that she can press the sharp joint of her thumb against her mouth.  “He wasn’t exactly wrong,” she says, half a mumble, muffled against her own skin, and Garrus tries not to bristle too hard.

He doesn’t do a very good job, and he knows his voice is louder than they’ve established for this conversation when he says, “He was _extremely_ wrong.”

She keeps talking like she didn’t even hear him, words picking up speed as she goes.  “I _am_ siding with Cerberus.  I know what they did, I know—I know what they _are_ , and I’m still working for them.  They killed my whole unit for a fucking _experiment_ and they—shit, they _tortured_ Toombs, they murdered Kahoku, and God knows how many other people.”  Here, she stops and takes a huge breath, one that shakes, like she’s barely holding back the urge to scream herself hoarse over it, to shout and gesture like she did on Horizon.  “And I _know_ the Illusive Man is—he’s bad news, he’s not exactly being straight with me or Miranda or fucking _anyone_ , but I’m _still_ doing what he says.  I’m still playing the part of his good _fucking_ soldier, and the next time Cerberus decides who’s expendable and who’s not, I’m going to be—shit, I’m going to be responsible for it.  They’re going to have me be the one pushing the goddamn button, just like the Destiny Ascension all over again.  Kaidan was right.  I _am_ a fucking traitor.”

“Shepard,” Garrus says, and when she doesn’t look out, he snaps, ” _Commander._ ”  That makes her gaze snap to his, automatic, and he wishes _desperately_ for a moment that humans and turians spoke the same language, could easily and efficiently learn to speak to each other without the aid of the translator, because while she might be able to hear what he’s saying, she can’t understand the distinctive strident pitch of _honesty_ in his subvocals the way another turian might.

He does his best anyway.

“You haven’t betrayed anything or anyone,” Garrus says, and he makes his voice sharp, hoping it’s enough to get through.  “You’re trying to save the galaxy.  _Again,_ by the way.  Cerberus is the only group willing to make that possible, so that means you’re working with them for the time being.  You tried to convince the Council, and the Alliance, and they sent you away.  Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to do it in a way you’d rather not.  If Alenko can’t make that leap of logic, he can deal with the consequences when the Reapers come down on him.”

“I should have found another way,” Shepard says to the floor, her hands dropping away from her mouth  to hang between her knees.  “I should have found--”

“Shepard,” Garrus says, stepping toward her on instinct.  Shepard doesn’t go in much for being comforted, he knows this, but the need to do something for her, to help take the visible weight off her shoulders, is too strong to resist.  He catches her by the upper arms and forces her to straighten up enough to look him in the eye.  “Gabriel.  You are _not_ a traitor.  Alenko was upset.  Grieving.  Whatever.  And he was _wrong_ , all right?  I know you, and you’re not just going to let the Illusive Man jerk you around.”  Garrus tries to put a little humor in his voice as he releases her and adds, “Besides, that offer to burn Cerberus to the ground is still on the table.  Just let me know, and we can do it, just the two of us and anyone else who wants to do the galaxy one more favor.”

Shepard smiles, because she clearly knows it’s what he’s looking for, but she still looks so sad. 

“It would have been—nice to have someone else I knew, on the team,” she admits, barely a whisper.  Then she clears her throat and her voice strengthens.  “Even if Kaidan and I were on, um.  Slightly different pages about commitment level, apparently.  He was still my friend.  I would have appreciated having someone else I could trust around.”  She hesitates.  “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

Garrus feels himself start to bristle again, his mandibles flaring.  He’s not jealous, he’s just—annoyed.  Angry that Alenko had Shepard’s affection, friendly or otherwise, and threw it away in such a rush, without even letting her finish explaining what happened. 

“He was way out of line to accuse you of abandoning him,” Garrus snaps.  “You _died_ , Shepard, that’s not your fault.  You were gone for two years because you were in a medical coma, not off wandering the galaxy.  If he really thinks you’d leave like that, on purpose, and let us all believe you were dead, he doesn’t know you as well as he thinks he does.”

Garrus has seen Gabriel Shepard make a lot of decisions, ranging from impulsive to stone-cold and calculated.  He’s seen those decisions cost lives both ways.  He’s still fairly sure that, if Alenko believes she would leave her crew to grieve her for two years by choice, then the man doesn’t know her at all.

“Maybe you’re right,” she says, distant, and then she blinks twice and seems to come back a long way to focus on Garrus’ face again.  “I’d have broken his heart, anyway.”

“You don’t strike me as the heartbreaker type,” Garrus observes.  It’s not— _strictly_ accurate.  She’s certainly left a trail of hopeless admirers in her wake across the galaxy, and he’s always understood very clearly exactly why so many people wanted to be around her.  There’s something about being the full focus of those green eyes that’s intoxicating, like having a sentient sun decide you deserved personal attention.  She pulls on the world around her like gravity—hard to notice until it has its hooks in deep, and absolutely inescapable once it does.  It still makes Garrus’ heart race, more often than not, to feel the weight of her concentration.

Maybe he can’t totally blame Alenko for, apparently, being far more in love with Shepard than she was with him.

On the other hand, it’s not like Shepard does it on purpose.  Most days, Garrus is pretty certain she doesn’t even notice.

“I just…”  Shepard shakes her head.  “I know that defending the bomb was the right call,” she says, and—of course.  Virmire.  Always Virmire.  The place where Shepard lost her unit again.  “Ash knew it too, that’s why she told me to leave them.  But—I never would have been sure that I made the call for the sake of the mission.  I’d never be _sure_ that I didn’t let her die to save him because my judgement was clouded.  Neither of us deserved that.”  She sighs, and reaches out to pick up her bottle again, rolling it between her hands thoughtfully.  “Besides.  Clearly he and I weren’t really a good fit, given the circumstances.”

“It _was_ the right call,” Garrus says firmly.  “Williams knew it.  She was a soldier first and she did her job.  She understood that sometimes sacrifices are necessary, in order to finish the mission.  Alenko obviously doesn’t.”

Shepard, finally, cracks a real smile at him.  “You don’t like him much, huh.”

“Never had much of a problem with Alenko,” Garrus says, dismissive, and goes back to setting calibration conditions.  “But I reserve the right to dislike people who yell at you in the middle of a battlefield where you just saved their life.  He could’ve at least heard you out.”

“I appreciated you stepping in.”

“Of course.”

There’s a moment of quiet, and when Garrus glances up, Shepard is drinking, her head tipped back so that he can see the long line of her throat move with each swallow.  There’s a shadow nestled into the hollow under her jaw, a place that’s never visible on turians—it’s a fragile place on any creature with the same basic construction, where the blood vessels are close to the skin and one solid hit could fracture the windpipe, and it’s alarmingly _accessible_ on a human neck.  Humans are so delicate, almost as breakable as quarians in their way, and so _fearless_.  Every other species as unarmored and lacking in natural weapons as a human fights cautiously.  Humans, though, humans discovered space flight and picked a fight with the toughest military around within the month, and doesn’t that just say it all.

Garrus wonders, almost involuntarily, if Shepard’s skin there is as soft as it looks.

He doesn’t realize he’s still staring, at the smooth line of Shepard’s throat and the angle of her jaw and the place where her soft human lips shape to the mouth of the bottle, until she lowers it and looks back at him.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you either,” Shepard says, rather than asking him what he’s staring at.

“What?”

“With—dying.  I didn’t mean to—leave, like that, I guess.”  She’s looking down at the bottle again, and for the first time in a while, Shepard looks downright awkward.  “I know—I got your message.  I know you were hoping to rejoin the Normandy, before what happened.  It was--”  She chuckles a little, rueful  “It was good to hear your voice.”  She glances up at him.  “I’m glad you came back, even after two years.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Garrus says.  The next words out of his mouth take him off-guard, but—it’s been a long day, and he’s exhausted, and it’s making him more honest than he should be.  “I would have come back even if it had been twenty.  You’re—of course I came back.”

“I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have anyone that I could trust on this team.”

“You’d do what you always do,” Garrus says.  “You’d make it work.  You’d help people.  Find new people to trust.”

“Maybe,” is all she says.

Her pupils are blown and she has an alcohol flush high on her cheekbones and Garrus wants to keep her here, somewhere safe, where she doesn’t need to put up the show of the competent commander and she can be her own self, the self that gets self-recriminating when she’s drunk and the self that likes dark jokes and the self that shouts giddily when she finds old friends.  He wants her to have that forever. 

If Garrus is being honest with himself, and despite everything he has very few illusions about Shepard, he wants her to have that with _him_.  However he can give it.

“I wouldn’t want to be risking my life with anyone else,” Garrus says, and tries to sound as sincere as he can.  Sincere enough for Shepard’s limited human hearing to pick it up.  Sincere enough to convince her that he means it.

“You need better friends, if that’s how you’re picking them,” Shepard says, but she laughs a little and Garrus chuckles too.

“I learned from the best,” he says, and gets a better laugh, a real laugh, one that makes her shoulders shake and her eyes crease closed, until the tension has stopped humming in the line of her spine and she’s just grinning at him, wry and rueful and honest.

She’s still smiling, faintly, when she takes another drink and rests her head back against the bulkhead, one foot propped up on the ledge and her wrist resting lax across her knee.  The air is easier to breathe, in the wake of her laughter, and Garrus lingers longer over the last set of calibrations than he needs to—when he’s done, she’ll tell him that he needs to sleep and retreat to her cabin.  He might even be able to manage it, now.  Seeing Shepard, alive and well and so entirely herself—so entirely the genuine article—has soothed some deep-buried restlessness that he hasn’t been able to shrug off in a long time.

He needs the sleep.  But on the other hand, he doesn’t want to give up this moment of peace.  The galaxy is at stake, they’re working with a terrorist organization, and yet—

And yet idling alone with Shepard sitting nearby, humming low in her throat to the tune of some song Garrus doesn’t know, both of them reeling with exhaustion while the smell of her alcohol hangs over-sweet in the air—it’s the most at rest Garrus has felt in a long time.

Shepard finishes her bottle of alcohol while he drags out his last set of commands, and he watches her out of the corner of his eye.  It’s nice—fundamentally _good_ in a way he can’t quite articulate—to have her there, the weariness and alcohol combining to turn her stiff military stance into a comfortable slouch against the bulkhead.  Her eyes are at half-mast, but from what he can see, she’s watching him, sleepy and wholly at ease, like their conversation lifted a terrible weight from her chest. 

The last calibration dings civilly at him, and he glances over at Shepard.  She looks halfway to falling asleep against his bulkhead, and her gaze wanders up from his hands to his face like she’s only just tuning in to reality. 

“We should sleep,” she says, and yawns.  Garrus has no intention of ever telling her that she’s almost adorable when she yawns, the way her soft human face creases and she scrubs a palm over her face and back through her hair.  “It’s been…a day.”

“It sure has,” he says, a little amused.  “Are you sober enough to get up to your cabin?”

“I’m not that drunk,” Shepard says, waving a dismissive hand.  “Might have a bitch of a hangover tomorrow, though, I think that stuff is mostly sugar instead of alcohol.”

“I’ll cover for you,” Garrus promises, and she narrows her eyes at him, as if the higher pitch of his subvocals tipped her to his carefully repressed laughter. 

“Thanks,” she says, and slides off the ledge.  She’s obviously telling the truth about not being particularly drunk, because she doesn’t even waver when she hits the ground, despite the respectable drop compared to her height.  Shepard smiles up at him, the one that shows just a few of her teeth, what he thinks of as her quiet smile—it’s real and uninhibited, not like the professional closed-lip smile humans learn for polite company with other species or public appearances, but it’s softer and smaller and somehow private in a way her grin isn’t.

“Anytime,” Garrus says, and hopes he doesn’t sound too dazed.

“For this, too,” Shepard says, gesturing around her.  “It’s—good to have friends, still.  Old friends are…something of a luxury.”

“Well, anytime you’re craving luxury, you’re welcome to come by,” Garrus says dryly, and Shepard is laughing when she leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been basically liveblogging my breakdown about these games [on Tumblr,](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/tagged/mass-effect) so pop over there if you want to see my wild theories about the Illusive Man being evil. I've just finished ME2 and I'm _pretty fucking sure I'm right_ and also _unbelievably smug that I got to tell him to fuck off._


End file.
